My Crime Spree

Sometime shortly after I healed from my broken leg, I began to get into trouble. We were often left to our own devices, us kids, and for me boredom + freedom = big big trouble. It started innocently enough. There was a "purchasing trailer" which at the time was located right next to Howdy Doody for some inconceivable reason. Inside the purchasing trailer were all sorts of goodies not regularly doled out to kids or other people at meals. This time, we discovered that the trailer contained variety packs, packs of those tiny boxes of delicious sugary cereals like froot loops and sugar smacks. We usually had cornflakes. Every day. Breakfast was cornflakes. So these variety packs were very enticing.

Jonas, that redheaded demon from my Poona days, told me how to sneak into the purchasing trailer to obtain the goodies. I did it and I stashed them under the sink in our makeshift communal kids' kitchen that was never in use. Yasha somehow found out about it and squealed. For that transgression, Sarv told Arun and me that we were not allowed to participate in the upcoming cookie and lemonade sale. The kids were busily baking cookies and fixing lemonade to sell at a stand, and we were all to share in the profits to buy candy and soda at the vending machines. No cookies, no lemonade, and no money for me.

I really wanted that money. I had been looking forward to lemon drops from that machine for a long time. That's when a plan sprouted in my tiny 7-year-old brain. I talked Garima into sneaking into people's trailers and searching for money. We would steal the money and buy candy. It was simple, yet brilliant. We started in this man's room, which was in the house nearest the kids' house. Jackpot. He had about $40. We took it. We decided that it was easy and we should move on. We went to Garima's mom's trailer and sacked all the rooms there for whatever we could find. On a commune, as you would expect, people didn't usually have much money, but what they had laying around, we found and took. We got excited.

We went to my dad's trailer and went around to each and every room in his trailer. We got greedy. And that, as it often is, was our downfall. One of the women that lived in my dad's trailer had a lot of gum and candy. The money wasn't enough, we decided to go through her candy and split it up. We got comfortable on her bed and began to divide the candy evenly, making sure nobody got more of anything. We were careless. The woman walked in and busted us. We ran out thinking we were lucky for only being caught stealing candy.

Unfortunately, the woman also told my father about our little adventure and he probed further. Someone else knew about the whole thing and told him about it. He was FURIOUS. I don't think I have ever seen my dad that angry, before or since, not with me. He called Garima and me into the school, which was located adjoining the kids' house. He spoke with Garima first and then sent her out. She looked stricken, though still alive. Now it was my turn. He took me inside and gave me a spanking. For the third and last time in my life, I received a spanking (the first was from my mother who spanked me after a friend and i drew with pen all over the walls of a room I had moved out of and into my "big girls' room" when I was four. She spanked me and said to my friend "i'd spank you too if you were my child, but i can't!" and then she made us clean it up with windex. The second spanking was from my dad when we lived in Poona and I was six. I was just being obnoxious, he couldn't tolerate it any more and he spanked me. He was admonished by my mom for that one.)

After the initial corporeal punishment, we were both told to go and give the money back to each and every person from whom we'd stolen and apologize to them. All told, we had stolen $82 and the gum and candy. We'd only spent about $1 each on lemon drops and soda when we were caught. Thus ended my crime ring.

My 15 minutes

In the early days of the Ranch, there were still relatively few people and everyone knew each other. We were still friendly with people in the "outside world" and we still knew how to have a good time. One night in early January was slated to be "Kids' Night". We were all going to get our opportunity to get on stage and perform songs, skits, dance numbers, whatever we wanted. My particular talent was and always had been, jokes.

I was still bedbound, but I was strongly encouraged by my favorite nurse, Debal, to put together an act. She promised to help me on and off stage, all I had to do was, well, something. For weeks, I perused all my favorite joke books, I made some up, I tried them out on Sarv (much to my daddy's dismay, I had started calling him Sarv when i returned to the Ranch - he was a teacher and that's what all the other kids called him and I didn't want to stand out, so Sarv it was and Sarv it stayed). I came up with a few jokes I knew I would tell, but for the most part, I planned to just wing it.

Finally, the night arrived. There were several skits by Hiroshi and Vishranta, they were all pretty raunchy, but some were actually quite funny. Gyana and Sonal screeched several off-key versions of Pat Benetar songs with a real rockin' back up band. Finally, after intermission, it was my turn. It took about 5 minutes and 3 people to hoist me on stage and prop me up and fix the mic, but finally I was situated.

I had a very hairy white monkey puppet, one of those ones whose hands and feet have velcro on them, wrapped around my neck. His name was Snowy and someone had given him to me while I was in the hospital in Madras. I started with some monkey shenanigans, he ate the mic, my hair, etc. And then I got into my best 7-year-old jokes: What's white and goes up? A retarded snowflake. How can you tell a happy motorcyclist? The bugs in his teeth. I'm telling you, the jokes were crap, but these people were eating them up! It must have been my expert timing and delivery. I finished up and got a standing ovation. I was beaming.

I enjoyed my fame for a few months. People were constantly harkening back to Kids' Night. I had been the star, they said. There was a tape and all the other kids always fast-forwarded to my section and listened to the jokes. Then the trouble started. Everyone always wanted me to tell jokes. Kids and adults alike to start, then finally the kids left me alone. For YEARS, I would go around the Ranch and there would always be some loser that would approach me and say, "hey Hira, got any good jokes today?" I began to hate jokes. I loathed jokes. Don't get me wrong, I love good humor, and I would still never miss an opportunity to make people laugh, but I despised preformed punchline humor.

Kids night marked the end of my confinement. It wasn't long after that I was out of traction for good. At first I was given crutches and I had to go to Physical Therapy with this awful German stereotype of a Physical Therapist fraü. The whole time I was in traction, people kept telling me that I was going to have to "learn to walk again", which I really thought meant that I was somehow going to completely forget how to put one foot in front of the other. I didn't. I really didn't need that much PT, and really I could walk again quite quickly, but this Nazi kept forcing me to come to her torture sessions.

Sarv finally took my crutches away when he'd discovered me playing the incredibly fun and moderately dangerous game I'd invented with Nicky. We would each take a crutch, climb up on a chair and essentially pole vault off the thing onto the floor. It was hilarious fun. Nicky became a very close friend after my leg was broken. Previously, he'd been one of my worst, if not the worst, tormentor. He was a couple years older than me and had a permanent limp due to a tubercular hip, whatever that means. We were told he'd had polio or tuberculosis and rumors about it were certainly more prevalent than the truth, so really I don't know. All i do know is that he'd lived in India when he was really young and caught a disease that was more or less treatable or even disappeared from the Western world, and that it had damaged him for good. Anyway, I think he was more sympathetic towards me after my accident and he became a very protective older brother to me.

After Sarv took my crutches, I had to enter the trenches with everyone else. I went back to school and was given a job in the warehouse sorting things. Mostly I walked around with my Walkman and listened to my John Lennon tape. But i think i did some actual work. Things were finally back to normal.